convolutes

This sounds interesting.  If I end up staying here in Los Angeles and not too despondent enough perhaps I'll be able to undertake a Los Angeles equivalent to this project. And definitely more biased, with an underdog's point of view of the city.

"For the past five years, I [Kenneth Goldsmith] have been working on a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project set in New York City in the twentieth century called Capital. As of this writing, the book is about 500 pages long, approximately half way to the 1000+ pages that constitutes Benjamin’s book. The idea is to use Benjamin’s identical methodology in order to write a poetic history of New York City in the twentieth century, just as Benjamin did with Paris in the nineteenth. Thus, I have taken each of his original chapter headings (convolutes) and, reading through the entire corpus of literature written about NYC in the twentieth century, I have taken notes and selected what I consider to be the most relevant and interesting parts, sorting them into sheaves identical to Benjamin’s."

"This is an exercise that is as much about reading as it is about writing. In fact, it’s a book that proposes reading as writing. While many other authors could have written Benjamin’s book, why is it that his is so successful, so endlessly fascinating? It’s about what he chooses. In lesser hands, such a work would’ve been dreary, dull, tedious, pedantic and loquacious. Instead, we have a book that is arguably one the most readable works ever written, yet very few words were actually written by Benjamin himself; it’s an act of conceptual writing where what one chooses — one’s taste — either makes or breaks the book." From here.